What the great majority of Democrats want — above all! — in their presidential nominee is the ability to defeat Donald Trump.
And surely that is the right priority: Donald Trump has shown clearly that the re-election of this President — who has managed to put himself “above the law” — would be a national disaster of the first magnitude.
The Democratic candidates, therefore, should be competing against each other over who can show him/herself to be the most effective champion to take the field against this dangerous President and best him in toe-to-toe political combat.
(See my previous piece, “Run Against Trump NOW! (How I’d Advise a 2020 Democratic Candidate to Get the Nomination and Beat Trump).”)
Yet so much of the debate — both in the debates (as pushed by the network journalists) and also in the campaigns as conducted by the candidates on the campaign trail — focus on their differences on a variety of policy issues.
These differences matter, but in the present situation they are of relatively little consequence.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times, David Leonhardt writes:
Yes, the candidates have their differences. But they have much bigger similarities. If elected, every single Democratic presidential candidate would act to slow climate change, raise taxes on the rich, reduce gun deaths, expand voting rights, lower health care and education costs, protect abortion access, enforce civil-rights laws, appoint progressive judges, rebuild overseas alliances and stop treating the Justice Department as a personal enforcer. The moderates are running to the left of Barack Obama, and the progressives would be constrained by Congress.
The alternative, of course, is truly radical. Many Democrats know all this, yet they still get so caught up in the passions of the primary campaign that they risk helping Trump.
The discussion of the Democratic race often focuses on the two main “tracks” in the race:
There’s the “progressive” track, in which Sanders and Warren are said to be competing. And there’s the “moderate” track, in which the competitors are said to be Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar (with Bloomberg in the wings).But if the main task is defeating Donald Trump, the supposed “ideological” differences between these candidates should be of rather peripheral importance. The big questions are not of the kind, “Are you in favor of sweeping away all private health insurance coverage?” or “How would you make the rich pay more of their fair share in taxes?” but rather, of the kind, “How would you go about persuading the American people that the re-election of Donald Trump would be a mistake of historical proportions, and that you could get this nation back on a constructive course?”
The real “tracks” at stake in this race are far less about how much progressive transformation these candidates would bring than about whether we will be on a track toward dictatorship, or toward a restoration of the constitutional/democratic order of the United States, with the rule of law.
Another reason the focus on ideological differences among the candidates is misplaced was quite cogently presented by Lawrence O’Donnell on his MSNBC program some weeks back. O’Donnell said that when it comes to these presidential candidates, the real question that they should be asked on most policy matters is, “What would you sign?” O’Donnell’s point is that the President doesn’t dictate policy, but can only enact what Congress is willing to enact.
For example, he said, when it comes to “Medicare for All,” such a measure has virtually no chance of being passed into law by Congress in the foreseeable future. Whether the Democratic President taking office in 2021 favors that approach or not, all that President would be able to do is sign what Congress will pass.
So O’Donnell played a clip of his asking Senator Elizabeth Warren whether if a bill came to her desk that fell short of her proposal — while establishing a “public option” within Obamacare, to compete with the private health insurance programs (and I believe this hypothetical bill would also offer “Medicare for Those Who Want It”) — she would sign it.
And he lavishly praised her answer, which was that sure she would sign it. “I’ll sign anything that HELPS,” Warren declared. “And then I’d fight to get Congress to go further to pass measures that would help MORE.”
O’Donnell called for the moderators of the debates to stop focusing on the different wish-lists of the candidates, and just find out what they’d be willing to sign, because that’s pretty much what Presidents can do.
And, as David Leonhardt intimates above, we should also call on the candidates themselves, when discussing such issues, and the Democratic primary electorate as well, to focus a good deal less on the differences among them than on the differences between all of them and the lawless and destructive President they are all working to replace. (They all would extend health care coverage, for example, whereas this President and his Republican allies are working to strip millions of Americans of their coverage.)
This battle is way too important for us to squander our energies and our precious attention on relative irrelevancies. Keep our eyes on the task of huge historical importance that faces us: to rid ourselves of this force of brokenness that has given us the unthinkable presidency of Donald Trump supported by this unthinkable morally bankrupt Trump Party that is his accomplice— a force that has come to the point where it threatens the foundations of the American system of government.